


no one else will have me like you do

by knifetop



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Couples’ Flamenco Class, Eliot Waugh: Monogamist, Established Relationship, Extensive Emotional Boundaries Discussions, Gentle Dom Eliot Waugh, Grocery Shopping, Implied Fix-It, Jealousy, M/M, Praise Kink, Threesome - M/M/M, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 07:59:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20738879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knifetop/pseuds/knifetop
Summary: “Hey,” says Eliot then, like he’s just having a thought, maybe about to suggest something they should watch on Netflix tonight. “Do you want to fuck someone else while I watch?”Quentin and Eliot have fun, and talk about it.





	no one else will have me like you do

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is kind of me thinking through and testing the limits of, mostly, eliot's issues around monogamy and jealousy related to his self-worth in a semi-healthy context, and how i love thinking about eliot and quentin being in an evolved enough place to have multi-day mostly-frank emotional discussions that take work, but with porn!!! also, porn!!!!!! great news: eliot and quentin are going to be together forever and invented romance.
> 
> there are passing, canon-typical references to suicide/self-harm, depression, alcoholism, etc. take care of yourselves, but we're mostly here to have fun.
> 
> thank you so much for reading and yelling at me [@cartographies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies), my best babe, and [@smallobjects](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smallobjects/pseuds/Smallobjects), my best and only butch. the title is from “23” by jimmy eat world.

“Q,” says Eliot, and his tone isn’t enough to unsettle him, even though it’s a _Q_ that’s leading somewhere, a _Q _with a destination nestled in it. “You told me about your first time with a guy, right?”

Quentin stirs in place at Eliot’s chest to look up at him, brows raising. Eliot grins back at him, and Quentin rolls his eyes, settles his chin just under Eliot’s collarbone.

“I did,” says Quentin. “Are we doing the thing where you want to be jealous? I literally _just_ had your dick in my mouth.” He makes sure to sound a little affronted but he doesn’t have to, like, try.

Quentin can be more flip like this _now_. It was something that hadn’t quite carried over from his absorbed comfort when they came back from the Quest, though it’s especially easy when he’s kind of joking.

Well. Not literally joking. He had actually just had Eliot’s dick in his mouth, yeah.

Eliot’s grin goes wider. “No, I don’t think we‘re doing that,” he says, almost contemplatively, and Quentin can annoyingly tell Eliot is thinking _something._

“Um, what is your face doing, right now,” says Quentin. Eliot is looking kind of, like, maybe...mischievous? Oh, fuck.

Eliot tilts his head back serenely, his fingers curling again in Quentin’s hair. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Quentin’s expression goes flat, but then he goes flat, too, his body going a little boneless against Eliot’s, closing his eyes at the sensation of nails gentle on his scalp. When he opens them again, Eliot’s tilted his head to look back at him. Eliot has such a showy way of looking at him, sometimes, of making Quentin feel watched, even though all it is is just Eliot’s eyes on his face.

“It was shitty, right?” Eliot says. “Your first time with a guy. You said...dorm party, awkward jerking off?”

Quentin nods, a little, his eyes for some reason closing again, at an absent feeling of safety disconnected from the conversation. He sighs when Eliot drags his fingertips along the base of his skull, like he means to melt away some tension Quentin didn’t realize was there.

So he doesn’t see Eliot weighing his words, but he can tell it’s in his tone, “So before we fucked—nothing good, with a guy?”

The underlying assumption might have seemed unbelievably brazen from someone else, in another situation, in any other lifetime other than this one. In this lifetime, it feels now like Eliot’s always been his best everything and he’s so fucking glad every day they got, what, a third chance? If you’re counting their threesome with Margo.

And Quentin kind of does, now. So it had fucked his life up, and immediately after he’d resented how good it still was, had just avoided thinking about _that_ at the time, and maybe, uh, he’d been angrier with Eliot because of that. Maybe. And even when he spilled his guts at Margo after he was, you know, alive again, Margo had said, _“Quentin, first of all, I remember all of shit about that night and never expected to hear about it again, though I’m sure I was bored out of my fucking mind after you two apparently started _making love,_” _which was a phrase she’d spat out like all feelings ever were disgusting, “_and _I’m_ not the one who needs to hear your sad-ass Lizzy Bennet_ shit _right now—”_

But.

Well, actually, it is brazen in that Eliot has now apparently taken it as gospel that his life was previously an unending dry spell of terrible sex. Quentin frowns at how long it takes him to catch up to being offended by that.

“Hey,” he says, softly, to register this offense. Eliot just raises his brows, expectantly. Quentin shakes his head a little, and closes his eyes. “Do this thing more on my neck and I’ll tell you.”

Quentin doesn’t need to open his eyes to know Eliot is smiling when he says, “So spoiled,” and immediately assents, both of his hands now coming to the curve from neck to shoulder at either side. Then he presses gentle but firm fingertips, kneads into his skin with a perfect, practiced slowness, and a little slip of a moan escapes Quentin before he can even think about it.

“Oh, honey,” says Eliot, soft, indulgent, not needing an answer.

Quentin still hums a little in response, not opening his eyes. El wants him to talk, maybe, so he doesn’t press fully into his chest like he wants to; he tilts his head so he can lay with his cheek down, his body mostly on top of Eliot’s.

“I had,” he starts, soft, “a couple other times. With guys.”

Eliot’s voice goes lower, maybe not softer, his fingertips pressing a little more when he says, “Tell me.”

Quentin doesn’t want to open his eyes, so he doesn’t. But he thinks he knows where this is going, and he sighs again. “It wasn’t as good, El,” he says, his voice pitching with the tenderness of it, how it’s not just an empty reassurance, far from it. “Nothing’s as good, you know that.”

And he still doesn’t want to open his eyes, but Eliot is silent long enough that he has to. And when he does, he sees that Eliot’s eyes are blown lushly dark, and at the same time he’s almost radiating with care.

“You deserved good, Q,” he says. And Quentin’s heart catches, a little, the way it still does sometimes, even though from the jump when he’d come back, god, Eliot had just _been there_ in a way that was nearly confusing, at first, because Eliot had closed that chapter. And then Eliot had explained that _he didn’t want to pressure Quentin_, and—

And they say these things now, they talk about these things, and it’s okay, it’s more than okay. But here’s the thing: he knows it’s still hard for Eliot. In this way, Eliot’s brave for him every day.

“I have good, El,” says Quentin.

And Eliot’s expression goes so struck-through that in the next second, he almost looks _annoyed_, and Quentin can’t help but laugh a little fuzzily as Eliot pulls him up to his mouth with his hands still on his neck.

And the sigh that Eliot gives sounds half-annoyed, too, when he breaks off from him. “Okay, tell me what was almost as good,” he says, and Quentin’s mouth goes weirdly dry.

So random hookups had definitely eluded him with girls, and he’d only had sex with the girlfriend he lost his virginity to before Alice, who then dumped him before his junior year was over at Columbia. There were awkward makeouts? But in comparison to the rest of his sexual history, three different guys at three different parties, one of which led to _more hooking up_, is jarringly, like—a lot.

So. There’s _some_ material. More than Eliot had ever previously expressed wanting there to be, which is an incredible fucking understatement of Eliot’s previous admissions (yeah, absolutely multiple) to his weird fixation on Quentin being inexperienced.

“Come on, El. Not even almost,” Quentin says, a little smug, but in response one of Eliot’s hands tucked under his hair fists up into it and pulls_._

Quentin’s lips part and his eyes almost flutter, his face above Eliot’s, but then he smiles, he can’t help but smile, and Eliot is smiling, too.

“It was, um—” And even though they’re, like, literally playing a weird sex game right now, what the fuck, he feels heat coming to his face, his smile going slack. “Just. Jerking off, again. It’s just—it was better.”

“How?”

He can feel his heart, like it’s getting nervous in his ribcage. And this is true even when he’s less nervous about this kind of frankness than he used to be. Before, it had been paralyzing, naming things he wanted even past tense. “El,” he says, and he doesn’t know what he’s trying to get, with the unspoken _please._

“Tell me, baby,” he says, knowing when to be patient. And it’s incredible what Eliot can do with just, the tone or timbre of his voice, how he says the things he says to him. Like he’s doing magic, Eliot conjures safety and reassurance.

At some length, Quentin nods, once, and swallows. “It was—it was always at a party. But another guy, um, obviously. So we started talking, and we started, he kissed me, actually, that was like the second time ever a guy kissed me, and we went back to—he didn’t have roommates.”

A smirk had started its spread on Eliot’s face, and it goes wide, there. “Lucky Q,” he says, and the tease in his tone almost makes Quentin shiver.

“It was really—” Quentin licks his lips. “It was good because he, he acted like he was into it. You know? It wasn’t just, like, we were both really drunk and it kind of happened.” That had been those other two guys. “I mean, it happened on his couch and I came really fast, so it wasn’t, uh. Romantic or anything.”

“He _acted_ like he was into it,” repeats Eliot, disbelievingly, like he’d gotten stuck on that and hadn’t heard anything else, maybe. And then, as if on a second thought and not surprising at all to Quentin, Eliot pushes up at him, turns them both over.

“You were on the couch,” Eliot says, his tone suddenly very casual in the way that’s usually dangerous, coming from him. “We shouldn’t do that, we have roommates. What else?”

This had thrown him out of a half-daydream that melts into the present moment with Eliot, who’s so much more compelling, god, he wasn’t fucking exaggerating. He couldn’t exaggerate about Eliot. “He—held me in place, kind of—”

“Fuck,” says Eliot, not at all distractedly.

Quentin nods with the beginning of some desperation, and Eliot is warm and naked, they’re both naked, on top of him, and so he presses his hips up into the bracket of Eliot’s but Eliot fumbles to _hold him down,_ and Quentin moans. Eliot’s cock is half-hard again, pressed to his hip.

“_El_,” Quentin _whines_.

“How did he hold you down?”

Quentin is almost squirming. “He—I—my shoulders, kind of, like, we were sitting—”

He can hear how Eliot sucks in his breath as he nods above him, with some urgency, and it should be inelegant how Eliot gets up on his knees on the bed and half-wrenches up Quentin, but Eliot is never inelegant. Quentin all but melts into him when he pulls him to his side and they’re sitting up, melts into how Eliot pins him in with an arm around his, wrapped tight like Quentin might try to get away.

Eliot kisses the corner of his mouth, his temple. “He held you down and jerked you off?” And all Quentin can do is nod and nod, their faces near-pressed to each other’s as Eliot reaches for his cock, and Quentin moans with the relief of it, the pressure that had been building from when he’d had his mouth on Eliot. And he remembers dizzily, separately, the greediness he paradoxically felt every time he went down on Eliot—

Eliot just leans forward to spit on Quentin’s cock in his hand, to slick him, and something about how perfunctory the action is, how _rote_, makes Quentin gasp. And at his gasp Eliot’s face tilts sharply back to his, and then El’s forehead presses to his temple as he makes a fist, strokes, and Quentin’s head lists back.

“Did you fuck into his hand?” And Eliot might still want to sound casual, he loves not being ruffled, but there’s a livewire current under his voice that Quentin knows too well but can barely hold on to suddenly. “Did you, Q?”

“_Fuck,_” is all he can say, and to his ears it sounds like he’s going to cry, it feels like he’s going to cry. And he knows if he says _yes_ what Eliot will say, so he just does it, rocking up into El’s hand, and Eliot’s motions go still even though he’s not asking for stage direction on if the guy—Patrick, shit, his name was Patrick—teased him this badly.

And his all at once desperation isn’t remotely fucking new, but should feel a little pathetic. Except that if it does, it’s just making it _better_, how Eliot keeps his hand still and is still talking almost against his ear, voice soft and surface-calm and full of praise.

“I bet he still thinks about this,” is the next thing that Eliot says that makes him feel like he’s going insane. “How could he not, Jesus, look at you—” And Eliot’s hold squeezes harder around his shoulders, firmer, and Quentin nearly cries out, not _in his mind_ enough to be mystified by how much this is getting to him.

And Eliot’s hand starts moving on him again, like he’s just as desperate as Quentin is, which feels impossible every time, it’s impossible how much Eliot wants him, how much they want each other. And Eliot repeats variations on _he jerks off to you_ until it turns into, “I jerked off to you,” and he sounds _broken_, even though it’s nothing he hadn’t admitted to before it hasn’t come out like this, without an apology for all the circumstances that shouldn’t have stayed sacred for either of them, “after the first time, after the Quest, fuck, I couldn’t get away from it, Q, why would, why the fuck would I _want_ to,” and Quentin sobs when he comes.

Eliot pulls Quentin into his lap and gets himself off with the friction of Quentin’s skin, his cock sliding against Quentin’s ass and thighs and his mouth open on Quentin’s neck, and Quentin doesn’t realize he’s still whimpering until Eliot groans, shaking, final, and stills.

“Holy shit,” gasps Quentin, not able to focus on his skin going uncomfortably sticky everywhere below his waist because, “holy shit.”

And Eliot nods hard into his shoulder, and they’re both just breathing, Eliot holding him still sitting up in his lap, which should be weird? But maybe in a minute Quentin will remember complicated concepts like moving, or laying down.

And it’s almost too tender when Eliot tilts Quentin’s chin so they’re looking at each other, and he smiles, shakily. “Are we into that?”

Quentin just nods, a little dumbly, but frayed-nerve laughter bubbles out of him on a second thought until Eliot kisses him quiet.

*

“Eliot. Um. Okay. Are you really sure you’re not going to be. Like. Jealous.”

The sentence works itself out of his mouth in the most belabored way because, well. Even if they’re like, Level 30 Elite Emotional Intimacy now, _somehow, _it’s kind of a sore topic when Eliot not feeling chosen and Quentin not understanding that Eliot wanted to be _told_ that of course he chose him, _you asshole_, had nearly fucked them both over for, what, the rest of their lives?

“Oh,” says Eliot, with bizarre brightness, “no, I will be.”

Quentin stares at him, mouth opening, closing. Eliot smiles.

And this was how they got there: they had an intentional, like, what, family dinner night, with Margo back from Fillory, and Julia and Penny and Kady and Alice. Josh, not so much, because the way it had been working for the past several months was that he was in Fillory when Margo wasn’t in Fillory. Except for the one time when it time-jumped _again, _this had seemingly worked out as okay as leaving Josh and Fen to babysit your realm possibly could.

The point was, family dinner, which meant Eliot was making a larger and more intentional meal than he usually did, which meant he would be unbearable to be around for about three hours. Quentin knew to come help when he saw Eliot cleaning up, though, with some pots and pans safely on the stove and something on a timer in the oven. The kitchen smelled like an idea of home, warm and rich, the specific savory nature of which he obviously couldn’t identify. Eliot would tell him, if he asked.

But when he came to lean up next to him at the sink, not even having to spare a line about reporting for duty for the habit of it now, Eliot’s head turned to him and he smiled before he kissed Quentin’s cheek, stepped out of the way. It left Quentin feeling warm in his wake, also almost routine, but never dull.

His hands are fully submerged in soapy dishwater when Eliot comes up behind him, wordlessly, so all he can do is go still when Eliot wraps himself around him, kisses his neck. The penthouse is quiet; everyone else had gone out separately, would be back soon, so Quentin just leans into it, closing his eyes until he can tell Eliot pulls back to look at him. He turns his head to look at him, too, and smiles.

Eliot smiles back at him.

“Hey,” says Eliot then, like he’s just having a thought, maybe about to suggest something they should watch on Netflix tonight. “Do you want to fuck someone else while I watch?”

It feels like, maybe the floor drops out from under Quentin, and his mouth drops open with it, and his voice is immediately strained to almost-sputtering when he says, “Jesus—_fuck, what,_” but in almost the same moment, Julia bursts into the kitchen with Kady in tow.

“Hey, we got wine!” Julia announces, shuffling bags on to the kitchen island. “Red and white, I wasn’t sure what would be good?”

When Eliot pushes away from him, Quentin half-turns from the sink to stare after him as he beatifically goes into one of the bags like they’d been talking about the weather, saying indulgently to Julia, “A nice red is _perfect._” Julia even laughs a little when he gives her an affectionate tap on the nose. She’s been in Eliot’s very clearly-defined Excessive Physical Affection tier for the last two years since Quentin had come back. He even trusts her on wine, apparently, which is Would Die For You tier.

And it makes him feel a burst of fondness in his chest, which is so fucking _annoying_, Eliot is so annoying. And like he hears the thought, Eliot then looks back up from one of the bags on the counter, and Quentin is reminded to feel near-breathless when Eliot smirks at him.

He’s such a shit.

Because Quentin has to sit through dinner thinking about Eliot saying _that,_ knowing they’re going to talk about it later, and also being too annoyed with him to just pull him into the bedroom so he can do the follow-up clarifications that have to come. Primarily: what _someone?_

So if he’s staring at Eliot, like, more than usual, it isn’t his fault, except when they’re all sitting down to eat, Margo interrupts conversation about some Fillorian land grab to say, “Are you two chucklefucks doing some kind of _bit?” _with her eyes suddenly narrowed and sliding between himself and Eliot.

“What,” says Quentin, “no.”

He expects Eliot to give an offhanded _yes,_ but instead, his face is the picture of innocence, his hands lifting and mouth pursing like he has no clue what she could mean. Margo’s eyes narrow further at him, then, with Margo-hawklike precision.

“Nah, they’re always this weird,” says Penny. “Did not miss it while I was in the Underworld, will _not_ discuss their freak shit at the dinner table.” Off this, Kady snorts.

“Hey,” says Quentin, his voice going faint, “hey, I was...dead...too.”

“I _know,_” says Penny, counter-indignant, “I was _there._” Kady even squeezes Penny’s arm in overplayed sympathy.

And then Quentin feels even more horrifically aware of his ongoing reaction to what Eliot had said, and he knows he keeps looking at Eliot, with Quentin’s mind just _going_ the way it sometimes does, seemingly endlessly. And when it pops clear out of nowhere in his mind that Margo will hear about all of this in detail, at some point, he actually kind of chokes on the wine he’s drinking, and Julia says, alarmed_, _“Q? You okay?”

He does not look at Eliot’s face. He does not look at Eliot’s face.

“_Why did you do that to me,_” Quentin says that night, when he finally miserably slumps back against their closed bedroom door.

Eliot laughs a little, half-falling into sitting on the end of the bed, soft at the end of the day. “I had,” he says, a note of near-dreaminess in his voice, “so much fun.”

Quentin nearly knocks his head against the door when he lets it roll back, before he pushes off to just sit with Eliot like they both know he will. Eliot just watches him with a smile that blooms when Quentin actually does sit next to him, and then Eliot reaches for his jaw to kiss him. Quentin hums half-hearted protest that gets swallowed up.

“You know, you’re not nearly as cute as you think you are,” Quentin says with their mouths still close, his voice tender.

“No, I am, though,” says Eliot, like he’s thrilled, thrilled by him.

And they don’t even change clothes, or go through any of the motions of getting ready for bed, before Eliot pulls them both up in bed so he can hold Quentin, lazy and warm.

“So, ask me about what I was talking about,” Eliot says after a nice, settled stretch of time, surprisingly gently instructive.

Quentin sighs; he’s the one with his hand up in Eliot’s hair this time, carding his fingers through the ends of it where it curls almost to the line of Eliot’s cheek. It’s an expression of great fondness that Eliot doesn’t get neurotic about how his hair looks when Quentin does this; he’s so _fussy_.

So that’s what gets them to talking about it, but Quentin lingers, a little longer. “I’m not surprised you wanna watch,” he says, another time where he’s smug at having barbs of his own, knowing how to get to Eliot maybe as much as Eliot, with great care and detail, knows how to get to him.

“Oh?” says Eliot, pleasant surprise making his face a little slack, but smiling.

Quentin hums a thoughtful _yes_ before they kiss again, Eliot still smiling into it, but then Quentin shakes his head into breaking off from him.

“What’re you thinking, El?” he asks, finally. It feels like he’d mentally reviewed every possible meaning of the one question Eliot had asked. But this is bringing them to the fact that this is, like, a whole thing, and he doesn’t want to make the wrong assumption and step on somewhere that hurts.

Eliot presses his mouth for a second. “I want us to pick out a guy for you,” he says, like he’s thinking of the logistics of a day trip. “Then I want to watch you two fuck.”

Okay. Okay. “Holy shit,” says Quentin.

And then, finally, it’s a hamfisted way to bring it up, asking about him being _jealous,_ but it won’t come out any other way. Especially not after Eliot saying that. Why would he say that and then expect them to have a productive conversation?

But then Eliot is just smiling beatifically at him, and it didn’t really address any of the underlying _things_. Eliot is still annoyingly good at doing this, even though he really does try. When Quentin closes his mouth, though, Eliot sighs a little, drops a doting kiss on his cheek.

“It doesn’t, um.” Eliot seems to have to think about it. “It doesn’t feel...as bad. Anymore. Like, you know, it’s there. But it doesn’t feel like...it maybe...threatens the whole fabric of my, like, being.”

Quentin blinks at him. “Jesus, Eliot,” he says, even though it’s not surprising. Eliot huffs almost impatiently.

“Is that enough emotional disclosure for us to talk about the fucking, or?” he says, then.

“Okay, literally no,” says Quentin, and Eliot all but pouts at him, his face goes so flat. Which is usually not their dynamic. Not that Quentin _pouts_. “What changed, El? Like, I don’t—wanna hurt you again.”

Eliot looks at him, for a second, his face going very warm, a sun rising. “That,” he says. “That changed.”

Quentin makes a small, unhappy sound. “I never wanted to—”

“You never said it,” says Eliot, not unkindly. “Neither did I. But we say it now.” He picks up Quentin’s hand and gathers it to his mouth, kisses over his knuckles. “I know I’m the one who gets you, Q.”

Quentin feels very soft, even with lingering annoyance, because he _knew_ this. He just meant to say he never wanted to hurt Eliot because be feels like he has to say it, still, the immediacy of wanting Eliot to know bubbling up out of his throat. Maybe it won’t ever go away. He hopes not.

“Well. Glad we figured _that_ one out,” says Quentin, and Eliot laughs at him, at himself, at them together, maybe, and pulls his face up to kiss like a bookend. Quentin hopes the part of the conversation where Eliot explains in detail what’s going to happen isn’t over yet.

*

So, Quentin really should have seen this coming.

It’s the weekend after their conversation, and they’re at gay bar/club/both (this one is mostly both) _number three,_ and Eliot has dismissed every guy he’s pointed out. _Too short. _Then, _Too tall. _Then, _Oh, dear god, too jacked_, with a look of surprise and maybe curiosity at Quentin’s interest; Quentin suddenly felt on display in a way that was becoming less and less of a daily torture, and shrugged too-aggressively_. _The next rejection was, _Weird vibes? _Then,_ I don’t like that shirt. _And fucking, _so on._ Eliot is literally the Goldilocks of, uh. Finding a dude who wants to fuck him. While Eliot watches, which maybe is the sticking point?

They’ve wasted a lot of cab fare and time and Quentin goes to bed really early now, but nowhere even fills up until, like, midnight, conservatively. He’d forgotten this Going Out Fact until Eliot gave him the _most_ bewildered look when he wanted to leave the house before nine o’clock.

They’re standing at a tall and sticky-surfaced bar table, and Quentin has heard a lot of Whitney Houston remixes tonight. Another one is blaring in the space around them. “I love Whitney, but this is highly pedestrian,” Eliot had offered at their first stop, into his ear so Quentin could hear and grin at Eliot being himself.

It’s early summer, it’s New York, so even the air feels sweaty, and the inside is worse than being outside in a place where people are dancing in closed quarters. And there are guys in front of them _dancing_, under neon light, a display that pings something in Quentin.

Quentin leans into the table, and Eliot makes a face. “You do _not_ know what this surface has seen,” he leans in to say, and Quentin stands straight up so fast. Eliot, the soul of sympathy, puts a conciliatory hand on his shoulder that then lingers, slides to his hip.

Predictably, Eliot leans into him, presses his mouth at Quentin’s neck with an odd chasteness, considering, like a reminder.

“What are we thinking?” El says right into his ear, chin on his shoulder now. Quentin almost closes his eyes; this is unhelpful, since they’re supposed to be considering their very-potential options.

“I’m thinking I should be drunker,” says Quentin, his head half-tilted back, with a little sigh that maybe Eliot can’t catch over the music. Eliot laughs anyway, and without Quentin thinking that he’s going to do it, he brings his hand up to Quentin’s jaw and tips his mouth fully to his, and they’re kissing.

And when Eliot’s mouth slides open against his, suddenly he doesn’t need to be more drunk at all, his skin on the edge of going buzzy, the air around them oppressive, Eliot’s hand flexing where it slides to his throat, ruthlessly tame enough for public consumption. Quentin moans a little, of course he does, with this and the rasp of Eliot’s stubble against his lips, the sound lost to the noise level or Eliot’s mouth or both.

When Eliot pulls back he presses his forehead to Quentin’s, his breath too-hot on his face, and grins a little wickedly. Quentin almost wants to whine in multiple senses of the word.

“If you just wanted us to fuck, why aren’t we_ home,_” he complains, and Eliot grins wider at him, delighted. Quentin feels the flush hot in his face.

Then Eliot cranes to his ear, again, his mouth almost on the skin of it when he says, “We have a fan.”

Quentin looks around, half-startled into the motion, and it doesn’t immediately register that yes, a guy at the bar on the opposite side of the dancefloor is staring at them. Openly. And he’s cute, in a clean-cut way that Eliot might be into, and maybe about Eliot’s height, with dark hair and dark tan skin.

And he feels Eliot start to kiss his neck, and his world blurs a little, again. Eliot’s arms circle his waist and he bites down in a way that must be very pointedly showy, but Quentin’s really not complaining, his mouth falling open without a thought to appeal to anyone else. There’s only Eliot, his mouth, music shaking his skull now that he is lost when Eliot sucks over a spot he had pressed his teeth, and it feels like his pulse is beating out of his skin.

His eyes open, he didn’t realize they’d closed because of how the pink-and-blue lights keep flaring even from the other side of his eyelids, when Eliot pulls his mouth away. Like he senses Quentin is unsteady, he does the job of steadying him, his grasp going firmer, one of his hands back up on Quentin’s shoulder. Quentin breathes out so hard he feels it in his chest, and turns his head back to Eliot’s face to see the beginning of mild concern: _Too much? Too far? Okay?_

“I’m okay,” he says, and he’s not sure if Eliot hears him when the music surges, or needs to hear him. Eliot nods and kisses his forehead, and when Eliot just presses his nose into Quentin’s cheek then, Quentin realizes he might not be the only one who’s a little unsteady.

They haven’t even done anything, gone anywhere.

Eliot’s hand goes down his arm, to Quentin’s own hand, knotting their fingers together. “I’m gonna go say hi,” he says, not leaning but raising his voice over the noise, and Quentin just nods a little uselessly, having half-forgotten any other objective. Eliot lets their arms stretch between them as he lets go, into the crowd.

When Quentin eyes cast back across the room, he nearly starts again to see the guy who had been watching them again, and—it’s like he’s looking through Quentin, with how piercing his eyes are, boring through him.

Holy shit.

He can only stop meeting his gaze when his eyes trail, as if he’s always magnetized to him now, Eliot parting the crowd. Eliot cuts a figure: tall over a writhing and sweating mass of mostly-men, and pointedly neither jacked nor shirtless, though Quentin knows he would be more than fine with the latter. He’s wearing a vest, of course. There’s a contrast, Eliot at odds with the environment and effortlessly moving through it. And Quentin thinks a little helplessly that he loves him.

And Eliot reaches the bar, and the man at the bar who’d been looking through him is immediately smiling, and Eliot is smiling, too, in a familiar way. Quentin he has no way of knowing what Eliot says when he bends to _his_ ear, but when he breaks off, they both look in Quentin’s direction. Eliot lifts up his hand, a carefree wave at him pinging from the earliest time in their knowing each other, out-of-context as it is, and Quentin feels a little awed.

“Hi, I’m Andrew,” the guy says when they get out to the night air, hot but cooler than inside, and so they’re reciting names with a sense of impatience on the curb that Quentin nearly doesn’t understand until Quentin gets out of his mouth that, “I’m Quentin?” And then _Andrew_ is kissing him.

And it’s so weird to be kissing someone who’s not Eliot that he doesn’t close his eyes for a too-long second, and it’s startling how instinct isn’t taking over, like it’s all reoriented around just Eliot. Andrew seems to take this for needing a lead, and his arms go around him.

“Oh,” says Eliot, somewhere outside of them, and Quentin can’t think about deciphering his tone, Quentin can’t think, he’s putting a lot of energy into being kissed like a normal person, disoriented. Outside of that moment, too, Eliot goes on: “We still need a cab.”

When they break apart, Quentin feels like he flushes from head to toe at the dim realization that this is happening in public, not feet from where people getting into the bar are lining up to have their IDs checked, under a sarcastically garish neon sign. Eliot walks them all of a block away from it until they hit a willing cab, and then it’s a blur again. He’s pulled to nearly sitting in Eliot’s lap in the seat and has an anxious half-thought about seat belts before Andrew is kissing his neck. Andrew smells like cigarettes and the scent hits Quentin maybe the way it shouldn’t, makes him miss smoking; he breathes in Andrew’s hair, at a loss to do anything else, and he hears something change in Eliot’s breathing behind him, too.

“Good?” Eliot asks, sotto voce, and even though obviously they both can hear him, Quentin doesn’t think how he would react to this if he was _the guy who’s trying to make out with him _and just nods, makes a little pathetic, whimpery sound.

They are going to a place that is not the penthouse, that he in a daze realizes Andrew gave the address for. He’s very, very slow on the uptake now, which has to be fair, because there’s a lot to process. Like: There’s every little change in Eliot’s breathing, that’s how he’s showing cracks in his armor right now. The feeling of new lips and teeth on his neck, even in the elevator up to where they’re going, and he surprises himself when he pushes Andrew’s head a little further down, to a spot he likes better under his collarbone. His eyes glassily open to Eliot watching them, his expression so full it’s like he hasn’t stopped talking even though he’s been silent since the cab.

Quentin only has his dim thought about this guy being a serial killer or not wanting to use a condom, or, or, once they’re in the apartment that was apparently their destination. Andrew had only stepped away from him to lead him by the hand, lead Eliot by proxy. Eliot’s presence is like a physical weight behind them even if they’re not touching.

Then Quentin remembers he’s a magician. _Oh,_ he thinks, and he doesn’t have this revelation out loud to Eliot or to the guy who’s very focused on kissing him, who’s probably not a magician but is maybe trying to coax something out of him anyway. They fall on the couch with Quentin on top, actually, he surprises himself again, because it doesn’t feel like it does when he’s in _Eliot’s_ lap. And for a moment, Andrew breaks off and stares up at him like he’s somehow surprised too, breathless, then he grins. It’s a light grin that makes Quentin kiss him again—

“He doesn’t usually like this,” Eliot says, and Quentin is the one who breaks off even though he realizes belatedly he’s talking to Andrew. Eliot looks, like, _amused? _Something? Quentin didn’t know the timeline of when he’d sat not on the chair, but on the coffee table right at the couch, one leg folded over the other.

“Come _on_, El,” Quentin says, almost a groan, and Andrew laughs, apparently accepting this as a thing. They take off clothes and Eliot reaches to pull Quentin’s shirt free of his arms, kisses him errantly on one bicep, and there’s still some humor in his face that Quentin sees.

In the course of taking off his own pants, Andrew gets Quentin off of him, goes on top of him and horizontal on the couch, but only to kiss down his chest.

“Oh,” says Quentin, breathless when the idea occurs to him, “oh, shit.”

Andrew’s hair is cut close to his skull but he tangles his fingers in it anyway when he reaches Quentin’s cock, fumbling it in his mouth. And the moment is marred when Quentin thinks again of _condoms_, condoms, holy shit, should he use condoms for blowjobs, he never has, what the fuck—

Eliot veers him off that course by saying, almost flatly, “You should bite his thighs.” He’s leaned over, arm on his knee, chin propped on hand. Quentin moans, uselessly, and hates Eliot a little even though he gasps when Andrew obliges by letting his cock slip out of his mouth, and turns his mouth then his teeth into tender skin, and Quentin is trembling.

“There we go,” says Eliot, and Quentin just sees him tilt his head, _watchful_ before he has to close his eyes when Andrew sinks his mouth back down.

And Eliot blurs the line between ordering around and color commentary and criticism, and goes, “Go slower,” a little admonishingly, then, “oh, oh, more gentle,” and Quentin moans, uselessly, an edge of annoyance over how _good_ it is.

“He doesn’t like—”

“Shut the fuck _up,_ Eliot,” he says, with heat that surprises him, and he gasps and opens his eyes to see what Eliot’s face does in response.

And what he sees is Eliot’s mouth is slack, his eyes dark.

Quentin curls his hands in Andrew’s hair and pushes up into his mouth but he can’t look away from those eyes, Eliot’s eyes. When he’s about to come and fumbles out to grip the sharp edge of the table, like he needs to find purchase, because he does. Eliot grabs for that hand, holds it up in both of his while Quentin comes apart.

*

The clock in the kitchen says it’s almost five in the morning when they get back to the penthouse. Quentin’s eyes feel too big for his head, swollen with exhaustion, his body wrung out so that he slumps in the elevator up, not even against Eliot. But he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to sleep, because.

But the alcohol, the night has more than caught up to him still, and he sways into something that clatters over impressively right after they get in past the elevator, in the stillness of everyone else in the penthouse being asleep. Eliot flicks on the light; it’s a bowl of fruit?

Mostly still upright, he groans, “_El._”

“Q,” says Eliot, concerned again, “come on.” And he doesn’t question Eliot guiding him to their bedroom, one hand at his shoulder and the other at his elbow. Apparently the things fallen on the floor could wait until, what, later that morning.

“Let’s get you,” starts Eliot, “a shower?” And Quentin thinks he might cry.

“It’s so late, Eliot,” he says like that’s an argument, his voice very small, and Eliot literally shushes him, saying “_shh” _so, so gently, his index finger pressing Quentin’s mouth in a way that should seem sardonic. Quentin wants to turn the gesture into a kiss, to kiss Eliot’s hand, but that hand withdraws, eases to his shoulder.

Eliot always takes great care undressing him, utmost when it’s not sexual, when there’s a sense of the matter-of-fact. In the dimmed lamplight of the room they share, Eliot all but sets him on the end of the bed and unties his shoes for him and slides them off. When he pulls his shirt over his head, Quentin is aware of the smell of his own sweat. Eliot has to grip his forearm to get one sleeve free, gentle. Then Quentin can fall back on the bed, watch Eliot undo his belt, the picture almost-blurry.

And it’s a miraculous thing to have Eliot taking his pants off not be hot, but when he thinks about it that way, he goes, “Eliot.”

“Hmm?” Eliot has shimmied the waistband of his pants and boxers down his hips at once, and doesn’t meet his eyes, task-focused.

“You didn’t come,” he says, his voice breaking on _come._

Eliot stops with Quentin’s pants bunched at his knees, looking up, and shadows carve his expression into great softness. “Lovebug, you’re delirious,” he says.

Quentin makes a complaining noise, not a whine, definitely not a whine, and he pulls himself up to sitting on the bed. “That’s, that’s what you wanted?” he asks, and anxiety that is technically over fifty years old, irrelevant now when he can outlogic it, trembles in his voice. ”That was it, that’s enough?”

Looking suddenly a little wan himself, Eliot smiles gently, and he just leans up to give him a kiss that lands on Quentin’s chin. Quentin’s eyes flutter, but he’s not soothed, especially not when Eliot says, “I _want_ you to clean up and sleep.”

And he’s so tired, _he’s so tired, _that Quentin can’t possibly explain that this isn’t what he needs from Eliot right now, he needs to _understand._ He needs to talk about it and make sure Eliot feels good. And Quentin then fully does give a little, pathetic kind-of-whine, which must be what prompts Eliot stand and gather him up, too, and shift them into their bathroom.

Eliot turns on the water for him and has a hand on his shoulder as he steps into the shower, and Quentin resents the care in the gesture but cannot possibly focus on why, again feeling on the edge of tears when he steps under the spray. He can’t think to be surprised when Eliot strips, meanwhile not making any motion to do anything resembling shower, the beat of the water on his skull making him aware he has an almost-headache. As his hair gets wet, it flattens and sticks to his skin, over his eyes, but he can’t think to move it. His thoughts aren’t going in order.

Then Eliot slides the glass door open into the shower, and instead of doing anything else immediately when he steps in, he wraps his arms around Quentin, standing behind him, steadying. When he brushes Quentin’s water-stuck hair away from his eyes with the sweep of his palm, Quentin lets his head list back against Eliot’s chest, his eyes closed. Eliot kisses his cheek.

And then after Eliot helps him dry off, which should maybe still be humiliating even if it’s not anything they haven’t done before. Quentin’s mind is sluggish and racing all at once. It pings back to just after he’d come back, when everyone was condescendingly careful with him but Eliot, Eliot was something else, and he’d found it in him to resent all of it because it was so hard at first.

Being alive was, is so hard.

Eliot’s eyes are a little red-rimmed with the lack of sleep, dark circles coloring in underneath them. It could make him think of when Eliot wasn’t inhabiting his own body, but even the most terrifying memories of his life are inert when it’s late and he knows he and Eliot are going to bed. And Eliot still pulls the towel from Quentin’s hair with an absent attentiveness of someone doing a very important chore, and brushes a stray, damp lock of hair behind his ear.

“We’ll talk in the morning, Q,” Eliot promises, obviously based on something in Quentin’s expression, which makes him relax it with some effort. “It’s just that it’s late, okay?”

When Quentin lays down, he’s in soft boxers, a worn-in t-shirt that Eliot helped him put on. Eliot’s not wearing anything, and is so, so warm when he pulls him into his arms, then reaching back to turn off the lamp as an afterthought, and his head spins with it because how many times now has he watched Eliot do that, that casual motion of care? And he gets it forever, and they can do things like this?

His mind won’t stop and his mouth is open on sentences that won’t form to explain it because it doesn’t make sense, but then Eliot, in the dim that his eyes are adjusting to, pulls his chin up and kisses him again, and again, and again. His hand on Quentin’s cheek, he presses his mouth over Quentin’s, then on the tip of his nose, back to his mouth again, Eliot’s stubble against his skin a shock in comparison to the softness and soothing at once. Eliot kisses him and Quentin sighs into it, the exhale turning into his breathing going steadier and steadier then even and slow, his face being warmly kissed into sleep.

*

Quentin wakes to full daylight, making him blink, his eyes bleary and wanting to stay closed. He does close his eyes again, and he doesn’t know how much time passes between then and the next time they open. It’s too bright, even with the curtains closed. The bed is soft and warm around him, but empty on Eliot’s side. That isn’t strange even if it’s not preferable, and for a moment, even with a dull throb in his head, it’s just waking up.

And then he remembers Andrew, slack-jawed and panting while Quentin had jerked his fist on his cock desperately, Quentin bent near-double at a bad angle, on his knees on the couch between Andrew’s legs. The ache in his back flares as he remembers this, as he remembers not feeling it in the moment at all.

The bed is still soft and warm, and he remembers how wet his mouth had gotten, just from kissing. Remembers Eliot’s Eliot joke about _being able to find lube anywhere_, the hesitation in action to find it for a fucking _line_ feeling like it would kill him even though he’d already come once by then.

Quentin gets up to brush his teeth.

The house is still when he closes the bedroom door behind him, but he hears movement, footsteps and plates being moved in the kitchen, and of course it’s Eliot, who turns around as he walks to the kitchen island. Everyone but them will be dealing with this week’s plot points.

“‘Morning, sunshine,” says Eliot, looking at him a little speculatively, but smiling. It’s clear that he’d been cleaning the kitchen. Quentin thinks about the shit he’d knocked over last night and knows he doesn’t even have to check to see if it was put back for him.

And Quentin feels annoyed with him, suddenly, paradoxically, because there’s so much they need to talk about? But what suddenly unearths itself to the front of his mind is, “Where’s Margo?” His voice cracks with disuse, like he’d slept for twenty years. “You’re not going back to Fillory?”

Eliot blinks. “Hey Eliot,” he says, in what it takes Quentin until the next word to realize is a weirdly-pitched and absolutely, by the way, nonsensical imitation of himself, “good morning, moon of my life, wow, ummm_, _did you make this breakfast for little old me, Quentin Coldwater—”

“_Eliot_,” he says, even though that does make him realize: there is breakfast. On the stove. It’s a pan of eggs that it looks like the others had gotten into at some point in the day.

“I’m not going back to Fillory right now, Q,” Eliot says then, seeming a little baffled or taken aback. “What in the last few days has made you think I would be going back to Fillory any time soon? Going back _today?_”

Um. “I don’t know?” he says, honestly. He actually hadn’t thought Eliot was, but had meant to ask about it since he didn’t exactly know what the nature of Margo’s visit was, and maybe it just bubbled out that way, because. “I just, I wish you’d stayed in bed with me,” says Quentin, deflated even though he’d never been angry.

And on a dime, Eliot softens to concerned. “Q,” he says.

He feels increasingly silly watching Eliot put food away, but then less silly when Eliot puts his hand on his back the way that he does, smoothing it down his spine through the fabric of his shirt on the way back to the bedroom. Eliot is, of course, fully-clothed, vest and all even though he’d just been doing Sunday chores, apparently.

Wrapped in Eliot again in their bed, Quentin feels like something inside of him settles. Eliot doesn’t speak, but Quentin can almost feel him thinking.

“Okay,” says Eliot, finally, and this pulls Quentin’s eyes away from where Eliot had been playing with his hand, lacing and unlacing their fingers, to Eliot’s face. He has Quentin cradled next to him. “Is this something where...I help you figure out what’s going on?”

Quentin nods, after a second. It’s easier to do this when it’s like he can’t process what he’s feeling, what he wants.

Eliot sighs, a little, and it’s hard not to read, like, _what am I going to do with you_ into it. “Okay.” Eliot’s mouth presses, his eyes moving over Quentin’s face. “You seemed a little...overwhelmed, last night?”

That was an insane understatement, but. Quentin nods again, and brings up Eliot’s hand to kiss over his fingers, like he thought of doing the night before. Eliot smiles, a little, not quite distracted.

“And that’s still happening?” Eliot asks, then.

“Fuck, El,” says Quentin. “It was like, what, six hours ago?”

Eliot’s smile at him, for some reason, widens. “Duly noted,” says Eliot, and then he’s the one who kisses Quentin’s forehead. Quentin realizes he’s frowning because it eases with the gesture.

Quentin understands, almost in a detached sort of way, that the way Eliot is looking at him right now is fond, with fondness. Sometimes Eliot’s face is so warm it feels like magic. A sound escapes him like he means to start saying something, and Eliot’s expression goes attentive, but. Nothing comes.

Eliot sighs, again. “I wish I could read your mind for you, Q,” he says, not quite like he’s annoyed. “What is going on in there?”

“I just,” Quentin says. “El, it was so good.”

And off of that, he gets a little smugness, but Eliot just _mm-hms_ agreement, waiting.

“It was so good, and you didn’t get, like, I don’t understand what you got out of it?” Eliot’s mouth starts to open, but he goes on, “Because. I don’t—Eliot. Sometimes it’s still hard to tell when you’re mad about something because you don’t fucking say anything, not even, like, your weird passive aggressive bullshit, not really, because it’s like, I don’t even know. You don’t think you have a right to be upset?”

Eliot looks a little mystified, maybe? “I’m not upset?” he says, but Quentin had known that.

“No, that’s not even—” Quentin sighs, in frustration. “I just mean, I feel like, sometimes you put yourself to the side still, but it’s not what I want you to do. I want us together, on, on everything, El.”

And Eliot’s confusion lingers, for a second, before he’s smiling again. “What you’re saying is,” he starts, sounding of all things a little bit cheshire, “you want me to tell you why I liked it.”

Quentin stares, for a second. Blinks. Feels his skin going hot, where the color would pool high up on his cheeks. “Not—”

But Eliot kisses him, softly, and other gestures of comfort are contained in it: that hand down his back earlier, the way Eliot has of wrapping himself around Quentin, making him feel smaller than he is and protected, the way he’ll drop a kiss on his head after a long day. And Quentin relaxes.

“That’s cheating,” he says when there’s space between their mouths, and Eliot laughs a little at him, pushes hair that can’t possibly be out of place back behind his ear. And Quentin, almost in spite of himself, finds he’s maybe smiling too.

“See, what I was thinking,” Eliot starts, and he shifts up a little, not quite like he’s going to put his body over Quentin’s, but. “From my perspective, this is about, what, you said six, so—that’s twelve hours of foreplay, right?”

Quentin’s mouth goes a little dry, his lips parting. And Eliot, his grin going wider, does push himself on top of Quentin, his eyes again moving over Quentin’s face but with a very different intention.

“Did you know,” says Eliot, his tone academic, “your toes curl when you’re about to come? Your whole foot kind of, actually.”

Quentin doesn’t breathe in for one second, two seconds, three seconds. “Um,” he says. Eliot nods, a little distractedly, still watching him more than looking at him.

“And the things your face does, Q,” he goes on, and Eliot’s maybe pushing him a little but genuine awe cuts through his words, too, and. “And last night, you did these—little gasps, when he was fucking you. Holy shit. And I love looking at your mouth when you’ve been using it.”

Eliot’s thumb brushes over his bottom lip, and sometimes when Quentin feels like he’s untethering from his body, Eliot doing just this feels like it helps. Like the weight of his fingers or his cock or just something in Quentin’s mouth gives him something to center around. Just then when he sucks Eliot’s thumb into his mouth and closes his eyes, it does.

Eliot makes a gratifying sound above him, an early unbalancing for him. “Jesus, yeah, _I didn’t fucking come, _and If I,” and Eliot is actually laughing, a little shaky, “if I never got off again but I got to watch _you_, Q—”

And Quentin moans, muffled, his mouth around Eliot’s thumb to the heel of his hand. When Eliot pulls that away all at once, Quentin’s head just lifts off the pillow when he tries to follow, needing something of Eliot in him to stay sane, but then Eliot kisses him open-mouthed.

They kiss until Quentin is whimpering, his hips rutting up uselessly and not quite finding any purchase against Eliot for friction where it would feel good for either of them, but Eliot groans into his mouth anyway, like the idea of it is enough. And Eliot pulls away, in nearly the same motion coming up on his knees on the bed, one on either side of Quentin’s legs, to lean over to get lube.

And Quentin’s skin is so hot but it feels more like butterflies in his stomach when Eliot yanks his boxers down to his thighs, apparently impatient enough to just bow himself over Quentin, one of Eliot’s knees pulling up over his thigh with a near-overbalancing movement, and then Eliot’s slicked fingers are pressing into his ass, just-cooler than his body, and he gasps and gasps, and hot embarrassment prickles on his skin suddenly because he’s still, already sore.

Eliot nods like he’s answering something Quentin said, like he can see the thought, the sensation written in clear black letters on Quentin’s face. And he’s going on, his voice still raw like he hadn’t stopped talking, “But that’s not even—that wasn’t what was good, sweetheart.”

“_El,_” he chokes, and Eliot grins.

“You left with me,” Eliot says, like it explains everything, shot through with awe again, and then his grin goes kissably slack. Quentin’s hips just twist up pathetically, and so Eliot slides his arm under his waist to get his hips angled further up, making Quentin cry out, near-hoarse already.

Eliot’s grip on Quentin goes firmer as he leans into him, his mouth at Quentin’s ear, “I got you, Q, I got you.” His voice is so wrecked, like he could somehow be as close as Quentin is, and Quentin knows—what he means. What it means.

“El,” he says, shaking his head fitfully, almost a sob, “El, stop, stop.” And he does immediately, and with his urgency there and gone the next, the pumping then stilling of his fingers is delayed, and the noise Quentin makes is embarrassing.

Eliot, his eyes moving over Quentin’s face, is breathing as hard like he’d been as close as Quentin, which is impossible, it’s all impossible, but he pulls his fingers out of his body with care, on the edge of saying something. Quentin just shakes his head again, ignores the confusion or whatever it is on Eliot’s face and pushes him up off him then down on the bed.

Quentin’s not conscious that his own boxers are still rucked to a weird place on his legs until he’s down at Eliot’s hips to unzip his pants, Eliot half-sitting up with the motion of him going down like he might stop him.

“Q,” Eliot breathes above him, somehow baffled. Quentin barely hears him, his focus suddenly singular, and when he pulls out Eliot’s cock, hard and leaking precome, he just bears his mouth down on it until he’s pressed firm into the back of his throat and he chokes, any sort of learned instinct for finesse blanked from his mind.

He hears Eliot gasp, feels Eliot’s hand hover to clutch at his hair, the hand that he’d just been working inside of him, then hesitate, as careful and fussy as if he can only lose control one way at once. Quentin moans around him, and he grabs for both of Eliot’s hands to steer them to his hair, and he feels like he’s underwater but he hears that it makes Eliot say, “_Jesus fucking Christ—_”

When Eliot comes in his mouth, the white-hot moment where he relaxes so familiar, the taste of it in the back of his throat a footnote attached to the thing he loves the most, Quentin thinks he’s got him, he’s got him, too.

*

There’s really not a lot more to unpack about this, but Quentin _wants to_, and feels a little on-edge with it over the next week. No, it’s not that he thinks Eliot is unhappy, that was already settled. As much as it can be. It’s just, um. It’s just distracting.

And he knows he is not being a useful research-helper when Julia straight up smacks him—gently—in the back of the head when his eyes have glazed over, over another pilfered Brakebills text in his lap where he’s sitting in front of the couch.

“Ow,” he says, when it hadn’t hurt at all. Julia grins at him, rolls her eyes.

“Please go help your boyfriend clean or whatever it is you want to do instead,” she says, very kindly, all things considered. And, well. She’s not wrong.

Later that day, though, he comes back out into the living room to find his jacket, to get ready to go out for groceries. Eliot is a habitual chores person, actually—he does all the quotidian shit well and keeps track of it, of things like changing the sheets every week or if they have any milk or what they could make for dinner with what’s in the fridge, without any sort of apparent effort. It’s a little bit miraculous, to Quentin.

But in the living room, Quentin finds his jacket on the back of the couch, picks it up, and turns to the door where he’ll shuffle his feet until Eliot comes out after him, except that Julia and Penny are at the same door. Kissing.

Quentin blinks.

It’s a goodbye kiss, the door half-open with Penny’s shoulder propped against it, and he hears embarrassingly intimate goodbyes before Penny ducks all the way out. Then Julia turns to look right at him.

“Oh,” she says, “hey, Q, are you and Eliot still going to the store?”

“Um,” he says. Quentin feels like he should put his jacket back on the couch and back out of the room. “Yes.”

“Would you get me that blueberry almond milk?”

He is vaguely horrified. Julia narrows her eyes at the visible reaction he must be having, and then goes, “Are...you the one who told me almond milk is shitty for the environment?”

“Um. No. Nope,” he says. Then: “Wait, what?”

Eliot pushes the cart around Trader Joe’s, leaning into it, while Quentin trails after him. Quentin can’t even focus enough to be bitter about the fact that this one of those multi-store trips that Eliot likes doing and he sprung it on him, Quentin somehow still surprised even when this is one of the occasions that Eliot _has_ to break out his cane, still. Eliot’s cane is currently jutting out of the kid’s seat in the grocery cart.

“Jules wants almond milk,” Quentin says.

Eliot looks back at him, brows raising. “It was on the shelf back there,” he says, like, _go get it then, Quentin._

Quentin looks back. “Oh,” he says.

“Did you know, it’s really bad for the environment,” Eliot says. It does not make sense that Eliot would know that.

“What the _fuck,_” says Quentin, he understands nonsensically, and he doubles back too-quickly to get the specific one Julia asked for then puts it in the cart way too violently, while Eliot, fully paused, stares.

“What’s up, buttercup?” is what Eliot finally decides to ask, at length.

“I saw Julia and Penny making out,” he says, not even quickly. Eliot looks, of all things, unimpressed.

“Okay?” says Eliot.

“_What,_” says Quentin. “It’s—Penny’s with Kady. Penny’s been with Kady since we came back, El. You know Penny’s with Kady.”

“Okay. What I’m getting from this is Penny and Kady are together,” says Eliot, and then in the next second he’s smiling blandly at an elderly lady who Quentin realizes is waiting for them to move out of the way of the boxes of tea, embarrassingly, so they start walking again.

“Shut _up,_” he says, belated, bewildered that Eliot is once again just serenely navigating aisles for stuff they need at the penthouse. “I didn’t even—remember the shit with Julia and 23 until I saw them today. That was a different Penny and literally two years ago.”

“I know how long it’s been since you came back from the dead, Q,” says Eliot, which should be grim and weird except for how he sounds so affectionate. Quentin’s nearly drawn up short thinking, Jesus: they just joke about it now. It’s almost just something that happened, when for months all he could see when he looked at Eliot or Julia or anyone was how his choice to die fucking traumatized them, beyond any smoothing-over, false underworld comfort.

And then one day, how Eliot had whispered in his hair when they were talking around it, like he read his mind even though Eliot would lament not being able to, _It wasn’t really your choice, baby, if I get mad and say something else then I’m so sorry. _Quentin had cried, wracking sobs for what felt like a whole day.

And now he gets to have these dumbass problems. Namely: “Okay! But Penny is fucking around on Kady! With Julia!”

The Trader Joe’s in East Village late on Sunday afternoon is apocalyptically busy, and still a few people look around at his outburst. Eliot opens his mouth, like he’s going to answer, then stops, grins.

“God, you really _didn’t_ know,” says Eliot, laughing a little, the joke-that-no-one-is-getting tone that Quentin loves making an especially frustrating appearance.

“Eliot, okay, _literally, _know _what?_”

Eliot shakes his head. “Quentin, Penny and Kady and Julia have definitely all been fucking in various combinations for the better part of the month,” he says, like it’s part of the weather report and not even a particularly interesting part, then he’s distracted by something on a shelf that he picks up and proffers to Quentin. “Boxed mac and cheese? I’ll let you have two.”

Quentin’s mouth fell open somewhere around _and Julia. _No: definitely right at _and Julia._

No one else is home when they get back, probably because they were grocery shopping while actual stuff was happening, which Quentin still feels a twinge of guilt about even though Julia seems happy to handle—well. All of it, with the occasional most token assistance from himself. The voice in his head whispering that he’s useless has long overstayed its welcome and mostly it’s easy to quiet it, now.

“You weren’t here to experience Julia and Kady after 23 took off,” says Eliot, thoughtful and continuing their ongoing conversation about this world-altering development, leaning up against the kitchen counter. “Not that I really experienced it, I mean, I was like half-dissociating most of the time. But I guess that’s essential backstory? Still, kind of don’t understand how you haven’t gotten the memo.”

Quentin sighs, rubs a hand over his face. “Julia just, hasn’t said anything to me,” he says.

“Well,” says Eliot. “Aren’t we still sterling communicators?”

The house is still empty when they’ve put all the groceries away. It’s empty after Eliot posts himself up at the kitchen island to watch as Quentin makes one of the boxes of mac he had been _allowed_ to buy, though he had bargained Eliot up to three. It’s empty when they get ready for bed.

“I wanted to talk to Jules,” he says, his voice soft in the space between his face and Eliot’s where they’re finally (it will maybe always feel like a _finally) _laying down, facing each other. Quentin’s arm is stuck up under his pillow. It’s nice to be like this and not be touching, in a weird way, like there’s no reason for either of them to be greedy for closeness, like they’ll have other opportunities.

“I know,” says Eliot, even though Quentin hadn’t exactly expected a reply.

Quentin licks his lips, on the thought that what he says next has to be careful. “So they have...like, it’s an arrangement. Thing. Something?” Quentin really hates discussing Julia in this context, actually, it’s pretty bad.

Eliot’s expression goes a little speculative, definitely amused, obviously trying to read him. “Uh? I haven’t actually talked to any of them about it,” he says. “Guess I hope one of them has Googled _polyamory_, though, yeah.”

Quentin didn’t think he had talked to them about it. That wasn’t the point. He sighs. “Eliot, you don’t want...that.”

It’s not a question, obviously. But Quentin had made the mistake of not, like, defining terms before. That’s mostly what he’s worried about, that Eliot is guiding him through something he somehow thinks Quentin wants, and letting himself take a backseat.

Eliot looks at him, suddenly bewildered, then actually laughs. “No,” he says. “I really, really don’t. Is this your best segue?”

“Fuck you,” says Quentin, like punctuation, and Eliot laughs again, kisses just the tip of his nose without unsettling himself too much to do it. It’s impossible for that to not leave Quentin begrudgingly lighter.

“Are you planning on finding a girl to marry again?” asks Eliot.

“No!” says Quentin, suddenly both heated and normal-volume, because there are fifteen different levels to him not being ready to joke about it. Like, ever. Eliot just barely raises his brows, looking at him for a second, and Quentin can’t tell if he’s amused or something else before he shifts on the bed, laying so he’s looking at the ceiling.

“Mea culpa,” is what Eliot finally says. Quentin sighs, and eases his chin to Eliot’s shoulder. Like a reflex, Eliot turns his face into Quentin’s, smiling, intimate.

“I realize you didn’t get married to hurt me,” says Eliot then, and at this Quentin almost wants to sit up, like they should have this conversation upright. He stares at Eliot’s face, instead, so close to his.

“You do?” Quentin says, a little deadpan. So what if it’s unfair of him to be suspicious? Or maybe it’s fair. Maybe he does need to channel his anxiety into protecting Eliot’s happiness. Someone has to fucking do it, and Margo’s in Fillory without either of them a lot of the time, so.

Eliot’s smiling again. “There are some days that you piss me off and I think I could murder you and also that you should just leave me, but most days, yeah.”

Quentin just purses his mouth, gives a little _hm_. “I can’t tell which part of that was a joke?” he says.

“None of it,” says Eliot, grin wide, and Quentin laughs.

And they’ve already had another version this conversation within the last week, just kind of gliding over a bunch of much-bigger things. But actually, maybe, these kinds of conversations don’t really have an end resolution the way Quentin wants them to.

“So we’re not polyamorous,” says Quentin, definitely trying the word out. Even though, well, he’d lived his early twenties and he was a nerd, he had for sure been around the judicious use of the word ‘polyamory’ before.

Eliot actually, literally rolls his eyes. “No, Quentin, we’re not fucking poly.”

“Okay, excuse me for trying to be a—_communicator_,” Quentin says, having to find the exact word Eliot had used earlier.

“You’re excused,” says Eliot, and Quentin really wants to pinch or prod him or something, but historically that would devolve.

“And it’s not, we’re not, _open_,” Quentin goes on.

Eliot blinks at him, pretending at extreme obtuseness when he says, “Like...open for business?”

Then Quentin does pinch Eliot, under his ribcage and at a spot carefully not near where any scars would be even though he doesn’t consciously think of it, and Eliot makes a sound that’s almost distracting in another way, turning to a laugh as he bats Quentin’s hand off. And then he takes that same hand, holds it in his.

“Stop being an asshole,” says Quentin, but warmly. “What are we doing, El? Just, tell me so I stop freaking out.”

Eliot looks taken aback, which probably makes Quentin look taken aback. “You’re really freaking out?”

“Eliot, I don’t,” he starts, not sure where the sentence ends, and it hangs in the safe stillness between them. “When we fucked up, the thing was, it—was always that we didn’t talk about it. The both of us, not talking about it. So, you know what, I have to talk and you do too.”

Eliot considers this and looks away, down to where their hands are linked. “We’re doing...monogamy with an asterisk,” he says, when he meets Quentin’s eyes again. “An asterisk that is exclusively me watching dudes fuck you.”

When it connects, the sentiment running underneath the sentence, Quentin feels his mouth go dry.

“What does that mean, El?” he says.

Eliot says, with the kind of soft amusement that comes before they kiss, “That I’m a perv?”

Quentin can’t feel that light and shakes his head, unmoored. He doesn’t know how he didn’t realize it, when this was the whole premise of whatever the fuck was happening. It was just him things were happening with, to.

“Not you, though,” he says. “Not you and, and anyone.”

Quentin maybe expects him to play it off, to get smug, but Eliot’s amusement gives way unshowily, his smile easing.

Moments like this he almost thinks he can remember all of their life at the Mosaic, but it’s like how you remember things as a kid. When you know something happened because adults tell you it did, and they tell you the story over and over again so that one day, it’s a memory that plays in your mind first-person. And that’s it: the way Eliot is looking at him right now lets him remember Eliot looking at him like this for fifty years.

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “That’s true, you’re really not anyone.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Quentin, and Eliot laughs to his mouth, his hand on Quentin’s neck.

Eliot pulls up just to kiss his forehead, and Quentin’s eyes stay closed until he feels him pull back again, and so he opens them. And there’s Eliot, who’s seemed larger than life since he’d first seen him. Eliot, who is a destined ruler of the world of magic that got Quentin through the first quarter of the not-dying marathon race when he thought it was fiction, which is alarmingly and dumbly literal, if he thinks about it now. It had just made sense at the time.

Eliot, who’s just looking at him, too, smiling, his hand warm and large curved up from the juncture of neck and shoulder.

Quentin absurdly feels panic rising, it must be triggered by that sensation of pressure in his chest. It takes him a second to think: It’s because Eliot doesn’t know what he’s thinking. It’s because Eliot might not really know all of that, even still.

Before he can think of what to say, it comes out as, “I love you so much, El.”

“Hey,” says Eliot, the tip of his thumb tracing Quentin’s ear. “Me, too.”

It should maybe sound avoidant, not saying _love_ back, but instead it sounds like Eliot is just agreeing with everything. And then Eliot licks his lips, his eyes moving on Quentin’s face.

“I know we’re like, technically in our seventies or whatever, but,” he starts, which is not where Quentin expected this to go, but okay, “god, we’re young. Don’t you feel that? Do you kind of remember arthritis?”

Quentin says, “No, that was always worse for you. I had to make all those salves.” He doesn’t even really remember that specifically; it would be like trying to remember a certain time you tied your shoes.

He remembers more how much he loved Eliot’s hands and how they became more and more distanced from how finely and intricately they could make magic, never mind how they could touch him. He guesses when it happens again, well, they’re magicians now with modern medicine, but. He tries not to think of things like that.

Eliot, for some reason, starts to seem impatient. “No, I mean—” He shakes his head, then he’s smiling a little again. “You’re 28, I’m 29, so pushing 30, but hey. I came to New York when I was an embarrassing baby and I still didn’t get laid again for like months because the self-loathing was too loud, but whatever, the point is, I did the clubs and the bars and eventually graduated to orgies. And it was—between that and meeting Margo, I became rough-draft me.”

Quentin knows the outline of this story. In this context, his forehead creases a little in confusion. “Are you saying. You like, want me to have...a gay...adolescence?” Quentin says, frankly fully bewildered and maybe kind of offended?

Eliot laughs. Which is worse.

“Kind of? Yeah?” Eliot says. “Is that bad?”

Quentin makes an unsettled little noise, pushes further into Eliot’s space. “Eliot,” he says. “I’m not—I’m not missing out on anything. I don’t feel like that at all, ever. I never did. You get that, right? When I say this is, this is the best thing, this is it, I really, really fucking mean it.”

Eliot isn’t smiling now, but his face lights up somewhere in Quentin saying this, with a warmth that still makes his chest tight again even though he felt like he was making some contrary point. And when the corner of Eliot’s mouth does lift, just a little, he realizes maybe he wasn’t.

Eliot doesn’t say anything, though, so what Quentin fills the silence with is, “You don’t need to, like, _gay mentor_ me,” and Eliot laughs again in his face.

“Quentin, look, this feels normal. It feels like I just want to see you being happy. I’m not trying to teach you anything,” he says, heading off near-ancient anxiety of Quentin’s, about not being adequately experienced enough for Eliot even though Eliot’s thing was _weirdly detailed virgin fantasies, actually._

“I don’t know if I buy that?” he says.

“Fair enough,” Eliot says. He says it pretty blandly, considering that the supporting beam under this one is that Eliot has only relatively recently been able to accept and integrate the fact that Quentin maybe even _prefers_ sucking dick into his view of the world. But, well. “Hey. Maybe I do want to teach you something.”

“Just one something,” Quentin deadpans.

Eliot ignores the snipe, shifts his face even closer to Quentin’s, sliding his hand up to tuck hair behind his ear. “I always want you to let go of it,” he says, like it might be strange that he’s saying it out loud.

What.

“Let go of what?”

He’s considering Quentin, his fingers doing nonsense things to his hair at his temple. “I don’t think I really know,” he says, slowly. “But there’s something—it’s like you’re hiding or you’re tense or something all the time. Even now, right, after the quest and then everything else. And that’s it. I want you to let go of it.”

Quentin can only look at him. And it’s like—a very specific and deep thread of hating himself that feels like it’s in the fabric of him, that he’s weird, that he’s different, that he’ll never be really like anyone else. But it’s the most generous, kindest version of it.

And Quentin opens his mouth to say anything but feels the pressure of tears bubble up at once, hot behind his eyes, the feeling of it like his whole face flushing and his lips near-trembling.

“Hey,” says Eliot, alarmed as always, then softer, “hey,” when he makes to gather Quentin up in his arms, sliding one of them under his body to pull him up into his chest.

Quentin sniffs hard, because they had been having a conversation, and it’s so annoying that he suddenly can’t talk or do anything but press his face right by the collar of Eliot’s shirt. It goes damp with his tears, the fabric wanting to cling almost to the skin of his cheeks.

He takes a shaky breath, and when he props his chin on Eliot’s chest, Eliot immediately thumbs away his tear streaks. Quentin turns into it to kisses the heel of his hand, like a reply, and when Eliot’s hand lingers at his face, he takes a deep breath.

“Do you want to do it again?” Quentin says, surprisingly more levelly than he thinks he can say it.

And Eliot laughs at him, his whole face changing on a dime, and pulls Quentin up by his chin to kiss. Quentin tastes salt from his own tears in it, which would have embarrassed him more at the outset of everything.

His breath feels hot feathering back on his own skin when he breaks away, to say, “You can’t, you can’t be weird again. To the guy. Whoever. I don’t know.”

Eliot laughs again, this time a little drunkenly, “What—” He doesn’t even finish the question, like it’s not worth it, pecking Quentin’s mouth instead, making Quentin give a little irritated hum.

“No, no, stop, you can’t—” And Eliot, knowing Quentin is not talking about the kissing, still pulls back a little, his eyes lit up. “—Can’t try to boss him around, Jesus, that was _so_ weird, why are you so weird,” Quentin finishes, in a rush.

“I’m just the best thing, I guess,” says Eliot, a little too serenely like he really is suddenly high or something, and Quentin wants to pinch him again.

“What was it about,” he says, between Eliot pecking his mouth somehow, like Quentin is being forced to see this conversation through if _only one of them_ will _try. _“You have to call the shots?”

“Weird of you to say ‘call the shots,’” Eliot suggests, right before he puts his mouth under Quentin’s chin, sucks skin on his throat like he’s daring him to complain about hickeys again. Quentin just moans, his arms slung up Eliot’s arms and shoulders for something to hold on to.

But he fumbles to turn Eliot’s mouth back up to his, a little desperate suddenly, and maybe there’s something to Eliot’s gay adolesence thing because he feels like a fucking teenager even though he had just been crying. It’s so stupid. It should be stupid. Quentin laughs a little, into kissing Eliot, and he feels Eliot’s smile before he feels Eliot’s tongue, swiping his bottom lip, pushing in his mouth as he cradles the back of his head.

Quentin breaks off from this, except it just means that his head pulls further into how Eliot is holding it, his fingers in Quentin’s hair. And he almost forgets what he meant to say because it’s a rare moment that he catches Eliot in full daze, unambiguous awe, breathing hard underneath him.

“El,” he says, his voice so small, and now he has to kiss him so he pecks his mouth, too. “El, tell me what to do. Tell me what to do next time. Can that be,” and Eliot groans like he’s hurting, both of his hands in Quentin’s hair now, but Quentin finishes the question, “can that be what we do?”

“Fuck,” is what Eliot says, harsh and overwhelmed, “fuck me, you’re never going to fucking understand,” but it turns out he doesn’t want to finish the thought more than he wants to touch Quentin.

Quentin forgets to ask what he meant, later.

*

They drink before they go out. It’s a Saturday again. It seems like a bad idea.

“This seems like a bad idea,” says Quentin, nonchalantly enough, before he downs the gin-and-other-things drink Eliot had made him with an impressive amount of laziness, considering it was Eliot. Then Quentin makes a face. Maybe too lazy. Or maybe Eliot would call him spoiled again. Probably that.

Eliot isn’t drinking at all right now maybe in general? They’ll work their way to talking about it again. Whatever.

“Club drinks are overpriced and watered down,” is what Eliot has to say for himself, not looking up from his phone which he is reviewing with what must be disproportionate intensity, his arm loose on Quentin’s waist where he sits next to him on the couch. “Hey, did we go to this place last time?”

Quentin cranes to look at Yelp open on Eliot’s phone. He doesn’t think so.

“What are y’all doing tonight?” says Penny, without any other announcement of his presence, and Quentin does what an outside observer would describe as _jumps._

From the neutral question blooms a look of deep and easy suspicion on Penny’s face.

Eliot leans forward, smiling up at him. “Couples' flamenco class,” he says, improbably, making Quentin open and close his mouth very quickly.

“Gross,” says Kady, from where she just appeared at Penny’s shoulder, before she crashes herself in an armchair.

Penny’s eyes un-narrow as he really, really laughs, and then he picks up the bottle of gin on the table and sips straight from the neck of it, before he uses it to gesture at Quentin. “_This_ motherfucker?” he says. “Flamenco?”

Before Quentin’s burst of self-righteousness can come out of his mouth, Eliot slides his arm up to squeeze around his shoulders and says, with great pride, “This motherfucker and flamenco.”

Later, on the sidewalk outside, Quentin digs his hands into his jean pockets, all of his limbs going ramrod in the same direction down toward the pavement. “Why are you a pathological liar,” he says to Eliot.

Eliot is smiling with some apparent restraint, and ducks his head as his hand finds the small of Quentin’s back as they walk, then his hip. “Not a pathological liar. Pathological other things, sure.”

Quentin rolls his eyes, smiling too, shaking his head to turn it away from Eliot’s brightness.

“Sorry, did you want me to tell Penny what we’re actually doing?” Eliot goes on, undeterred. “Compare notes on our _arrangements?_”

“Shut the fuck up,” Quentin huffs, bumping his shoulder into Eliot’s maybe a little too hard, but Eliot just laughs as he lists back into him to return the hit, and maybe early drinking was not a bad idea. He feels bubbly-light and, and happy, yeah, the air just lightly balmy in a way that should feel stifling on alcohol-hot skin but doesn’t.

The place that Eliot had looked up is a bust and they get there even later into the night than planned, having maybe gotten distracted making out in an Uber and not realizing they were going to an entirely wrong address. Still after all of that, the bar is basically dead, but Quentin feels alight as they spill out on to the street again, and on to, uh.

“What was the itinerary?” Eliot asks him, walking backwards. He’s going to run into someone? He’s not going to run into anyone. Quentin’s face hurts from grinning.

“You literally had one job,” says Quentin.

Eliot twists in his own space, suddenly, and Quentin sees how his eyes alight on the cross street. “Hey, no, no, we’re close to somewhere. Let’s go.”

Eliot turns to walk again immediately, forcing Quentin to half-jog to catch up. “Itinerary?” he asks.

“We’re circling back to it,” says Eliot, grinning wide, and Quentin laces his arm around Eliot’s waist this time. “So there’s a place I used to go before Brakebills up two blocks from here,” Eliot goes on. “It has great historic value. For me.”

“For you_,_” agrees Quentin. Even though now that he’s thinking about it, imagining Eliot swanning through wherever they’re about to be, charm all on, his skin goes a little hot.

Then when they get past the drag queen checking IDs, this one seeming quite fond of Eliot, it’s wall-to-wall sweaty college boys and—Ariana Grande? An Ariana Grande remix is playing. Why does he know this is Ariana Grande.

“Jesus Christ,” is what Eliot says, back outside. “Strike what I said from the record, we’re not remotely young, we’re fucking ancient.”

“I’ll make the salves,” Quentin offers, and Eliot shoves at him, making him almost-pratfall, making Eliot in turn do a mad grab at the fabric of his shirt to keep him upright, laughing.

But it hits Quentin, with a start, that he hadn’t felt self-conscious, not really, not once when they were touring around the finest gay dive bars and clubs. Eliot allowed him to be anywhere and sometimes not even think about it.

The other night hadn’t been that different—striking out between Eliot’s _selectivity_ act and dead places, until. But there’s a relief to knowing what this is, more or less, that is coloring everything in brighter. Eliot announces, “Third time’s the charm,” at both their third and their fourth stop. Quentin’s never gone more than two places in a single night for partying purposes before the last two weeks.

“I’m so fucking tired,” Quentin has to raise his voice to be heard over the music, even though he’s gleefully pressed into Eliot like they’re about to dance.

Eliot grins. “We’re _so_ old,” he says into Quentin’s ear, loud even so but making Quentin grin, too, making him put his face in Eliot’s neck.

Quentin’s almost surprised when they’re actually dancing. It’s reminiscent of when they started just, you know, being _boyfriends: _Eliot had taken him out on several strangely performative, weirdly awkward dates. And then it had been, cut the shit, we did this for decades. But Eliot was maybe sweetly hung up on doing it right, Quentin eventually figured out.

They’d gone out dancing on one of those dates, and again Quentin feels kind of like a particularly uncoordinated ragdoll because Eliot takes the lead in what is surely a ballroom sense of the word. Usually to dance Quentin has to be oblivion-drunk or high or both, because Quentin has to become unaware of the fact that he’s not sure exactly what his whole body should be working together to do, and also not painfully imagining what he must look like.

But Eliot takes Quentin’s arm by the wrist so he can put it around his neck, and then Quentin’s feet only just lift off the ground for a dizzying second when Eliot reels them around.

Quentin laughs, breathless, a sound that cuts off when Eliot draws him closer to sway with their hips flush, absolutely nothing to do with the weird strains of “Dancing Queen” over the house beat that’s playing. Eliot’s face is close to his, skin shiny with late-night sweat and eyes very open, and Quentin can’t believe he gets to maybe make Eliot as happy as he looks.

The moment feels so quiet in Quentin’s mind even though music pulses around them, and a lot of the bodies around them are wearing glowstick jewelry or leather or both. And he has a thought that feels hysterical to him but that he immediately acts on; he reaches down to squeeze Eliot’s inner thigh, not quite getting at his dick, and levers himself up to kiss him at once, coming away from it gasping a little.

The light seems to pink-purple lights over them flicker Eliot’s face from stunned, to smiling, right before he descends back on kissing Quentin, teeth grazing his mouth. There’s no argument in him about how they should have stayed home if this was going to be it.

When Eliot wrenches himself away from him, they just breathe and sway with Eliot setting the tone, and Eliot reaching to fiddle with how Quentin’s hands settle holding him, each in turn. Quentin is dazed, and smiling, but when his eyes happen to turn they alight on a man sandwiched between two others but blatantly looking him up and down. He’s blond, and closer to Quentin’s height, with a face very angular under the flashing lights when he smirks.

He sees, from the corner of his eye, Eliot realize something is happening; his expression shifting, Eliot turns to follow where Quentin’s eyes had been just as Quentin looks back up at him, his mouth open.

The guy presses through the crowd to them. They had stopped moving, but Eliot pulls Quentin back into the sway of his body, the two of them close, even though the music feels distant. But then Eliot steps back from him, hands on his waist easing to fingertips then to nothing before he takes Quentin’s wrist.

And Eliot looks at him, expectant, making him feel silent and still in the middle of an overcrowded dance floor, until Quentin just nods, a little.

Eliot grins at him before he becomes a conduit, reaching back past a few pressed-in bodies for their newly-interested party with confidence that’s only unremarkable because it’s so casual, and it works. Eliot steps back like they’re all dancing and trades out his position in front of Quentin, leaving the blond guy in his place, and this guy isn’t shy enough not to press his body as close to Quentin’s as Eliot was. Quentin again feels like he’s blushing all over, his lips parted with the expectation of using them and their faces close, and this time they kiss before they all exchange names.

It’s all a lot faster and blurrier than it was the first time, small details falling quicker by the wayside, anticipation and anxiety coiling in Quentin’s stomach less on the fact of it _happening_ and more on how it will be _different_. Outside, Quentin’s heart hammers in his chest when the guy (no name, yet) pushes them both with little regard of Eliot, and his head is spinning. He hasn’t thought to stop the kissing, but then he hears Eliot say, “Hey, your place?” with a level of firmness that makes Quentin sway a little when the guy pulls off. He realizes they had maneuvered into an alley between the club and a restaurant; he can just see around the corner some drunk people in patio seating.

What the fuck.

The guy looks between the two of them with Eliot beside them, takes a second for him to smile. “Yeah, okay,” he says.

Quentin barely has time to swallow the lump in his throat (_fucking in public with a third person_ was maybe too much just cognitively, it would have to be just Eliot like three more times and also did he even want to, except they had sort of done it a few times already) before they’re in a car. Quentin is fully on this guy’s lap before he finally huffs out, “I’m Blake.”

Quentin knows he hears Eliot smother a laugh next to them and that he thinks absently of pinching him except that Blake’s tongue is in his mouth. Blake has more than some stubble, and Quentin’s skin feels a little raw already. When he kisses and presses into his neck, the sensation of it there makes Quentin tip his head fully back, whimpering in a way that’s probably embarrassing, he can’t think if it’s embarrassing.

And he’s suddenly aware of Eliot’s hand on his back, big, warm, familiar, and Eliot strokes that hand up and down like a tether Quentin can always find again if he gets lost. Quentin almost forgets what they’re supposed to be doing and wants to list into him, following what feels good, but then they need to get out of the cab. The air feels dizzyingly cool, even though it’s late in the summer.

Quentin’s legs are really too shaky for any level of stairs, let alone a four-story walk-up. But there’s the blurry feeling again of not needing to question anything as they file up in a silence that feels weirdly light because Eliot pushes him forward a little once they’re on the last landing, making him laugh as Blake is jangling keys into what is hopefully his apartment door.

He couldn’t have described how the living room looked later, Blake barely gets the lights on before he pulls Quentin through to the bedroom with fingers in the belt loops on his jeans, his mouth back on his. And Quentin remembers what they’d agreed would happen when he feels Eliot press warm against his back, making him break away from the kiss to be overwhelmed by two people pressing in on him from both sides, _wanting him, _but like the first time this had happened with the both of them Eliot is a center of gravity. But his heart beats double time only because he knows Eliot’s about to say—

“You wanna blow him?” And Eliot’s voice is calm, sure, but so fond, so strangely affectionate. Quentin moans, somehow like he’s surprised, because somehow he is, and Blake laughs a little breathlessly.

“Any objections?” Eliot says next, and Quentin realizes he’s not talking to him. Blake shakes his head, and pulls Quentin back with him toward the bed.

Like a dance again, but if Quentin knew how to dance, he falls to his knees while Blake sits at the edge. He’s aware, of course he’s aware, that Eliot folds down to his knees behind him, one knee on the ground between Quentin’s own, but. The rush of expectation of what’s about to happen when Blake unbuckles his own belt, unzips his own fly, pulls his own cock out from where it was straining against the fabric of boxer briefs, makes Quentin’s mouth literally _water, _which feels insane, it’s an insane thing to feel.

They didn’t quite discuss the parameters of this, but Quentin _knows_ with overpowering instinct like he has to wait to actually do anything, to be told again. Their faces are close when he turns to look at Eliot, not thinking to look at Blake for a reaction, not thinking of anything. And Eliot is just smiling, and curls his fingers into Quentin’s hair.

“Show him, sweetheart,” Eliot says, like no one else can hear them.

And Quentin nods desperately, the motion turning into plunging down to get his mouth around Blake’s cock. Above him Blake actually _hisses, _and sometimes he’s still overwhelmed enough with Eliot that any thought of finesse or teasing flies out the window and he just wants to swallow him down. He’s not quite there but it’s not really _graceful_ how he just tries to get his mouth down until he feels pressing in the back of his throat, chasing what he knows will make his mind go blank and open.

Eliot’s fingers flex in his hair but Blake’s hands fumble there, too, clutching harder than Eliot would. There’s no reluctance to fuck into his mouth from Blake, hitting the back of his mouth again and again, making Quentin see stars, half-gag a few times. Quentin hadn’t lingered over the size of Andrew, but Blake’s cock is closer to his size than Eliot’s but strains his mouth still, his lips already feeling sore.

“You’re taking it so well,” says Eliot, soft, not so much breaking through the haze as part of it, and Quentin moans, feeling turned inside-out, and tries to force his mouth down further, blindly trying for more praise, disconnected from how Blake’s thighs are going tense still in his jeans, under his hands, how Blake is panting.

But Eliot cradles the back of his head and says, instead, “Pace yourself, come on, you know that’s better, pull your mouth back—” And so Quentin does, near-gasping in breath through his nose. Eliot’s mouth is pressed at the shell of his ear when he says, “That’s it, baby, that’s right.”

Blake groans when Quentin pulls his mouth back to work it hard over him without focusing on taking it all, instead tonguing under the head, the slit of his cock, working with the hand he has up around the base of his cock, too. Quentin still moans when he finally presses his mouth back down, and in response, he’s not expecting it, but Blake pushes his hips all the way up, rough in how he hits the back of Quentin’s throat again. Quentin gags, his mouth pulling off on instinct so he can gulp air with a familiar wet sound that feels far away.

But Eliot, pressing into him, says, “Hey,” and Quentin is dizzily confused by that in the second before Eliot curls the hand in his hair Quentin’s hair hard and pushes Quentin’s mouth back down with the kind of force Quentin tries to urge him to when he gets him close with his mouth on Eliot’s cock. Quentin knows he cries out, Quentin knows it’s muffled, but he’s so far away from himself and he loves Eliot so much.

Blake pulls out when he comes and Eliot holds Quentin’s face up by the jaw as he spills on it, Eliot whispering into his ear, “Mouth open, mouth open,” and Quentin can’t remember anything about his life before this moment.

Everything else blurs; Eliot again finds lube and condoms and Quentin fucks Blake. It’s not quite an afterthought, it’s just that he can’t think of anything except what’s happening moment to moment, what Eliot is telling him quietly to do. When they get on the bed it becomes that Eliot’s body is lined up with his, turned to face him, while Quentin is on his knees, the soreness that will again be there tomorrow not quite cutting through everything else, between Blake’s legs with Blake hot around him, Blake clutching at his sheets so they might pull up and off.

“You pull him back,” Eliot is saying, “you do the work, Q, you’re so good at it,” and Quentin just nods and nods and can’t stop whimpering, little pathetic sounds, with Eliot letting him act out being in control by not being in control at all. When he comes, Eliot surprises him by drawing up and kissing him while his hips are still twitching, and he feels so helpless and so cared for that his heart might burst.

The walk back down from the apartment to the street, soaked in his own sweat in clothes that he’d never fully taken off, except his shirt, is so much worse. A few times Quentin stumbles and Eliot steadies him by the shoulders; the first time, Eliot laughs at him a little, with no cruelty in it at all.

They get in a car, and considering his lifelong anxiety about car wrecks and how many times he’s really, really flouted that recently, it seems fine enough for him to just kind of lay down, his body cramped in the back of the Lyft they’re in into a position where he can put his head in Eliot’s lap.

If Eliot bristles, Quentin doesn’t notice. What he does notice is Eliot putting his hand in his hair, gentle, and starting to stroke it back in a rhythm. With his legs folded up underneath him uncomfortably, streetlights beating over his face from the window and casting Eliot in silhouette, he dozes.

Eliot doesn’t quite have to wake him, but he shakes him anyway, whispering his name. They spill out of the car onto their sidewalk that’s quiet at this time because it’s mostly rich-residential. Quentin feels like it had taken a hundred years to get home, all at once, but he doesn’t feel overwhelmed with it, not this time. But Eliot doesn’t speak as they go into the still-lit lobby to the elevator, hand-in-hand like they’re coming back from, what did kids in the fifties do? Like a milkshake date. Quentin laughs at the thought, in giddy second-wind exhaustion, and Eliot looks back at him with a question about where that laugh came from that doesn’t actually come out of his mouth.

“Are you okay?” Eliot asks him in the elevator. He sounds like he’s not tired at all, even though his face tells a different story.

“El, I’m,” and he laughs again, “I’m so good.”

Eliot hums a little, distracted-sounding, and leans over just enough to kiss his temple. “Not too much?” he asks.

“No. No, you’re never too much,” Quentin says, voice going small with how it's the most earnest thought bubbling right out of him when he’s tired and rebounding into being drunk and knows exactly where he’ll be sore tomorrow. And he loves it. He loves Eliot and he loves his life, he loves being alive, right now, right this second, in a way he never thought he would. In a way he maybe never thought he deserved, not really, even when he was so bitter about not having it?

And Eliot’s face in response goes so soft, and they kiss, of course they do. With their mouths still together Quentin’s mind sticks suddenly to something that makes him laugh, again, almost into Eliot’s lips.

“What’s that now?” asks Eliot, finally sounding tired, but in a good way.

“It’s just,” and Quentin’s laughter is maybe sleep-hysterical, he’s still laughing, “I didn’t—you know, I didn’t even think if, if I looked ugly or stupid, not once, no matter how naked I got. Either time! That’s so—that’s so fucking weird. Oh my god.”

The elevator dings, and the doors open, their home dark and quiet on the other side of it. But Eliot is looking at him in a way that makes him stop laughing, and he takes Quentin’s jaw in both of his hands, and he kisses him until the elevator door closes again. 


End file.
